17 November 2013 12:13 AM

This is the season to be soppy about servicemen and women. We buy and wear our poppies, and go on about ‘heroes’, a word which embarrasses soldiers quite a lot.

This is typical of our national doublethink about fighting men. The more we gush about how wonderful they are, the less we spend on the Forces and the less we understand what they do.

And the more we treat them as sentimental figures in stained-glass windows, the more we recoil from the unpleasant reality.

As we prepare to shove a Royal Marine sergeant into jail for killing a wounded enemy, we piously intone ‘we will remember them’ at war memorials.

As we do so, do we really think that the wars of 1914 and 1939 were chivalrous affairs, fought by schoolboys, in which we did no wrong? Does anyone really think we never shot prisoners?

We certainly let them die. I still possess somewhere a card signed by the pitifully few survivors of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst (36 out of a ship’s company of 1,968). Shouldn’t there have been more? My father’s ship, the cruiser Jamaica, had been sent in, with HMS Belfast, to finish off the burning, crippled Scharnhorst with torpedoes on Boxing Day 1943.

He was quite pleased to have been there, but got a bit gruff about the last bit. They had left quite a few German seamen to die horribly in the freezing water and the poisonous fuel oil, and they could be heard calling out for help.

This is a terrible breach of the laws of the sea. But much like Marine ‘A’, most of the British bluejackets present would have muttered, as they steamed away from the screams, that Hitler’s navy would have done the same for them, if things were the other way round. Like Marine ‘A’, they would have been right. The official reason for this was justifiable fear of German U-Boats.

But I suspect that the Russian convoys, an especially merciless theatre of war, had hardened hearts on both sides. In war, good men are ordered by their superiors to do bad things, the opposite of what they would do in peacetime.

They obey because they can see the sense in it. It has always been so. In which case, their superiors had better know that their purpose is justified. They had better win the war, so that the other side doesn’t drag them before a war crimes tribunal. And, in all justice, they should not ask too many questions afterwards.

If our criminal justice system ruthlessly pursued every crime ever committed, then the prosecution of Marine ‘A’ in Afghanistan would be justified and necessary. But we do no such thing. Millions of crimes, some very severe, go unpunished, often for political reasons.

Worse, we now have a political class which likes to go to war solely to make itself look good. Our current Prime Minister so enjoyed his vanity war in Libya that he yearned for another one in Syria.

He models his life and work on Anthony Blair, who knew (if it is possible) even less about the world than David Cameron. This empty person longed to make the planet better with bombs and bullets. The scale of his failure, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is still not fully clear, but it is colossal, a pyramid of human skulls as big as the Millennium Dome.

Yet while Marine ‘A’ awaits news of his sentence, and prepares for prison, the Blair Creature wanders the world in luxury, advising despots on good governance and trousering enormous fees for greasy little speeches, pausing only to buy more property.

The Chilcot Inquiry, which ought at least to have shown Blair publicly for what he is, is stalled, perhaps forever. It seems it may never report properly. This is because British officials are blocking the release of documents recording exchanges between Blair and ex-President George W. Bush.

We are now being told this is the Americans’ fault. Perhaps it really is. But why are the men who actually created these wars allowed to hide their private conversations, when the unwise remarks of sergeants and privates can be used in evidence against them, to fling them into jail?

The next time you see Mr Blair wearing a poppy, or see any politician simpering about our ‘wonderful Armed Forces’, remember this. Those who did Blair’s bidding end up dead or maimed, or on trial, ruined and in prison cells. He remains whole, at liberty and rich.

Is a new Royal Train steaming into sight?

Maybe the Royal Train can after all be saved by steam, as I urged the other day.

The people who built the superb new British steam engine Tornado tell me the Queen has given them permission to name a planned new engine The Prince of Wales in honour of Charles’s birthday.

It’s a replica Gresley P2, for those who understand these things.

One of the reasons nasty people like the metric system is that it destroys landmarks and helps them bamboozle the customer. When jam and marmalade were sold by the pound, you could tell when the makers were raising the price.

Now they’re sold by the gram, they quietly shrink the jar instead. And last week, Mars and Cadbury cut the size of Christmas boxes of chocolates (once a reliable two pounds), ‘while keeping prices the same’. That is, they’ve sneakily raised the price.

A big grey shadow is stalking Dave

Is Sir John Major planning a comeback? The terrible thing is that it is not unthinkable.

The talent pool of British politics is shallow and depleted, and full of small croaking creatures so slimy that you can’t tell if they’re frogs or toads. As a result, Sir John now looks like a gigantic figure.

The father of the Cones Hotline and railway privatisation is mysteriously said to be a ‘decent guy’ when his life history suggests he is a master of cunning and a betrayer of promises.

If I were Mr Cameron, I’d be watching out for him.

Sir John is outraged by our lack of social mobility. He seems to blame this on the independent schools. How odd. Britain’s comprehensive state school system, whose main aim is to make us more equal, condemns most of its young victims to exclusion from the elite, while the private schools, whose main aim is still education, waft their lucky products straight on to society’s upper deck.

An intelligent person (are there any in politics?) would understand the real reason, the closure of hundreds of state grammar schools 40 years ago. Labour started this, but Tory governments smashed up hundreds of fine schools from 1970 to 1974 – and then between 1979 and 1997 failed to reopen a single one. Now it would be illegal to do so (one of the laws we actually enforce).

If Sir John wants social mobility, he can find it in Northern Ireland, where a fully selective grammar school system still exists.

There, children from the lower social classes have a much better chance (roughly a third greater) of getting to university than their equivalents on the mainland.

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03 December 2012 4:47 PM

Before I reflect on the thrilling, disturbing season of Advent, a few responses to comments. I really do wish that my message about the Tory Party would get through. I noticed that a Twitter contributor yesterday claimed I had had an ‘epiphany’ about the Tories, after reading this week’s column. He had genuinely thought that I was a Tory supporter. I think I have been attacking the Tory Party, and urging its destruction, for nine years now (I thought it was seven, but when I checked, it was nine). How interesting to be abused and despised by so many people who can’t even be bothered to make the most basic effort to find out what I think.

Well, for those who are surprised, or want to know more, here is the most complete statement of my position on that awful party, published here first in October 2007:

Voting is not compulsory, and voting for your enemies is a definition of madness

Why worry about ‘Keeping Labour out’ unless you can produce a single significant difference between the Brown government and this one? Go on. What is it? (actually, Brown was less likely to join the Euro. That’s about it)

You can’t start a new party in the British two-party system unless one of the dominant two is collapsing or has collapsed. Simple eh. You have to get rid of (or badly damage) the old one before you can begin the new one. Not so difficult when it has its current leadership, eh?

UKIP does no harm, but will not do any good either. It has no real intellectual centre, and looks to me as if it has cribbed a lot of its ‘policies’ from newspaper columnists. What do grammar schools (a fundamentally authoritarian conservative concept) have in common with decriminalisation of cannabis? UKIP is just Thatcherism in exile, confused and directionless, and wholly lacking in any understanding of the New Left.

Yes, I do mean that about the BNP.

Now, to Advent. Being a northern person who greatly prefers a frosty morning to a sunny afternoon, who loves to see storms beating on the coast and trees shaken by the wind, I enjoy this time of year, which seems to me to be full of promise and immensely exhilarating.

There is something about the long light of the low sun (when it appears) which is particularly thrilling, and the rapid dusk of the short afternoons intensifies the pleasure of homecoming from a long walk in the crisp, open air.

On my way to and from last week’s debate in Exeter, I was able to have the long train journey in a winter landscape without which this time of year never feels complete to me, something of an adventure thanks to floods, landslides and a heating failure, which gave the return journey (which began before dawn) a bit of a wartime, adventurous feel . It was all the better for that. Apart from ancient memories of childhood rides home behind steam engines, with the red sun caught in the bare trees and the steam flying past the window, my best memories are , in no particular order, of a polyglot lunch of schnitzel and beer with German travelling companions in the Mitropa dining car on the run from Hanover to Berlin, through East German territory, but sealed off from it; a great sweeping passage across the deserts and mountains of Chinese Turkestan, on the way from old Kashgar (still running with blood from the Korban sacrifice of thousands of sheep) to Urumchi, under something very like martial law, where I wouldn’t have been surprised if I and my companions had been arrested on arrival; a nervous passage from the Hungarian border to Bucharest at Christmas 1989, past shepherds in long sheepskin cloaks, and down to the capital through the oilfields, often imagining I could hear gunfire – and then realising I really could; and passing through County Durham at twilight , with the castle and Cathedral of Durham itself mysteriously and melodramatically highlighted by new-fallen snow. It looked much as Arcangelo Corelli’s ‘Christmas Concerto’ sounds.

Then there’s Kay Harker’s fictional journey home in the opening chapter of John Masefield’s glorious book ‘The Box of Delights’. A book I had read to me (in part) by a teacher at the age of seven, and finally completed 40 years later (I hadn’t known the title, and had hunted for the ending for years till I found it by accident) with some of the most evocative descriptions of winter weather and its romance that I’ve ever seen. Though I might add that J.B.Priestley’s ‘Angel Pavement’, which I’ve just read for the first time, has a similarly astonishing depiction of the sensation of an winter afternoon in London (amongst many other fine things).

How very proper it is that such a time should also have a celebration to mark it. The Godless or indifferent world only recognises Christmas now, and has turned it into a month-long period of feasting culminating at the Nativity itself. But the Church has advent, which (inconveniently in this season of browsing and sluicing) is a fast, like Lent only shorter and so easier to stick to.

It is also a time of great music. In my home city, Oxford, the University Church (St Mary the Virgin, owner of the great spire that stands over the High Street) holds each year a service in both English and German, to mark the season. Lessons are read in both languages (it is interesting, if you have a smattering of German, to listen to Luther’s Bible and catch the moments where it falls into step with Coverdale and Andrewes). It opens with Palestrina’s tremendous, coldly lovely Matin Responsory for Advent, which belongs to all cultures and all ages, features The English Advent carols ‘O come, O come , Emmanuel’ , ‘Lo, he comes’ and ‘Hills of the North’, Cranmer’s Advent Collect (‘put upon us the armour of light…’) , ‘Wachet Auf!’ sung one verse in German and one in English, and a glorious mixture as the English sing ‘Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates’ and the Germans sing ‘Macht hoch die tur, die Tor macht weit”, (by the third verse the Germans are usually winning).

The history of this is that a number of German Lutherans, many of them converts from Judaism, fled from their homeland in 1939, found their way to Oxford and were offered the University Church’s hospitality. The connection has continued ever since, and has been reinforced by a substantial number of German Lutherans working at the Joint European Torus, a tremendous scientific project, at nearby Culham. And before someone says to me ‘But you’re an anti-European xenophobe’, I will here point out that the cultural, scientific and musical unity of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, all delight me, and are completely achievable without a supranational Eurostate or lax, wide-open borders. I might add that if you think we’re all the same, the difference between Bach and Tallis or Gibbons is as great as that between Weimar and Oxford. If ever you’re in Oxford round the beginning of December (and many would-be undergraduates and their families are, as it is the interview season) it is well worth coming to this event, especially now the church has just undergone a rather fine restoration. Too late this year, though.

But the thing is, as the people stream out having consumed large quantities of German Christmas sweetmeats, that the music is perfectly suited to the season – cold, clean, exhilarating , full of anticipation of the coming feast . Of course, the Advent scriptures are also rather alarming, and seem to speak of tribulation to come. But when the promised King arrives he appears (as God so often does in people’s lives) in the surprising form of a helpless infant.

I wish I could communicate this part of the Christian religion to critics such as Alex Gabriel (whose argument with me is posted elsewhere on this blog) .

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25 May 2010 7:57 AM

What is it about steam locomotives? Is it just my generation and the ones before, or does the curious magic of these things affect the young as well? Twice in the past few months I've been at railway stations when proper mainline steam specials have unexpectedly passed through, as opposed to those unsatisfactory, twiddly little branch lines where you can spend a bank-holiday afternoon watching some old shunter mocked up as Thomas the Tank Engine pottering along a few yards of track.

One was pulled by an old Great Western King Class engine, the other by an old Southern Railway Merchant Navy class monster, of the sort that used to haul me backwards and forwards to and from boarding school in my childhood.

Both, of course, were in superb condition - as they rarely were in the final weary days of British Railways. Both emitted immense quantities of steam - the King Class grew a sort of gigantic white moustache before moving off, and looked as if it was pawing the ground. The Merchant Navy class actually 'let off steam', an expression people nowadays use who've never seen or heard what this really means, a deafening white column shooting high into the sky.

On both occasions I felt a curious exhilaration, and actually ran to get a closer look before they vanished, perhaps for good. In the end, they're only machines, so why do some of us find them so captivating? George Orwell (see previous posting) once wrote about the strange uplifting effect that the sight of big guns had on him when some passed by in a station during the Spanish Civil War. It's not all that hard to work out why that should be. But railway engines? Diesel and electric ones just don't do it for me. I could understand trainspotters if they still had steam. But now? Where's the pleasure? It's steam that somehow catches me.

For me I must confess that it's partly the seduction of nostalgia, which I know to be a false comforter. The sight of a steam-hauled train is a door straight into the past. It strikes several senses at once, including smell, the most evocative of all (though the echo of the deep, steady bark of an accelerating express locomotive as it gathers speed through the suburbs is pretty evocative too). If this thing suddenly exists again, then perhaps the lost, demolished streets of handsome houses behind the gasworks have mysteriously reappeared, perhaps the cattle market and the brewery are open again, and the old sorting office where I used to do Christmas shifts has reappeared, and the buses have conductors, and policemen are walking the beat in tunics and helmets and my parents are still alive, and lots of other people to whom I need to offer apologies are available again, and if I reach into my pocket I'll find it full of proper heavy money instead of the poor thin stuff they give us nowadays.

And then the illusion goes again, of course, when you see that the train is not a normal one, but a shiny Pullman with linen tablecloths and cut-glass lamps.

But is it only these evocations? Or is there just something extraordinarily moving about the sight of unconcealed, easily understood power - the red roar of the furnace, the great connecting rods like steel limbs, the exposed wheels taller than a man? I've no idea. But I hope I never cease to be thrilled by it, whatever it is.

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